The long-awaited fourth installment of the Mad Max series Tom Hardy’s near-mute interpretation of the title character as he crossed a desert wasteland pursued by the cult leader Immortan Joe. But despite the title, it was really the story of Charlize Theron’s Furiosa and the brood of captives she saved, with Max acting as a conduit for their daring escape.

Thrilling and intense, Fury Road's dystopian sci-fi managed to condense years of backstory and lore into a few minutes of screen time without ever compromising on its relentlessly fast pace. However, as a result of this adrenaline-fulled storytelling style, a few details of the Fury Road universe were left mysterious as the quick-moving movie expected viewers to fill in a lot of blanks so as not to slow down the pace. Anyone looking for Immortan Joe, Furiosa, and Max's canon backstories, for example, needed to seek out the tie-in comic series.

Related: Furiosa: Every Question The Mad Max Prequel Can Answer

But one of the many mysteries of Fury Road that not even these comics would answer was what the exact nature of the ‘Green Place’ is, and why this now-lost location matters so much in the world of the series. For much of the action of Fury Road, the Green Place is essentially a geographic MacGuffin, a location that the eponymous antihero, Imperator Furiosa, and the liberated captives of Immortan Joe are headed toward but no one offers much of an explanation for. However, a deep dive into the origins of the movie’s mythical oasis in the desert illustrates not only why Furiosa and the Vuvalini of Many Mothers thought it would still be there, but also why it wasn’t and what happened to it, as well as what the area’s destruction represents in the universe of the Mad Max series.

What Was The “Green Place”?

Mad Max Fury Road Desert Landscape

Long before the events of Fury Road (and presumably before the unseen apocalypse as it occurs in the Mad Max universe), the Green Place was a still-fertile section of land located outside what later became the Citadel. The Vuvalini inhabited the area for an indeterminate period before the events of Fury Road, during which they cultivated crops on the land and survived via its rich soil. However much like the rest of Mad Max’s deserted wasteland setting, the soil of the Green Place eventually became too contaminated to human life or farming. It was at this point that the Vuvalini of Many Mothers moved on, although Furiosa’s adamant certainty that the Green Place exists tells viewers that it was likely still home to humans during her life. Little is known about Furiosa’s pre-Fury Road backstory, and there’s a solid chance that her prequel movie starring Anya-Taylor Joy will explain her connection to the pre-destruction Green Place.

Who Lives There Now?

Fury Road Crow Fisher

Since the area is now merely a fetid bog, very little life can be sustained by the so-called Green Place. As a result, few inhabitants of the Green Place are seen during the events of Fury Road, but there are some (presumably pretty mutated) humans who manage to eke out a miserable existence in the setting. Just about glimpsed during a brief sequence set in the Green Place, the Crow Fishers or Sky Fishermen are shadowy figures that befuddle Max and Furiosa. According to director and original Mad Max creator George Miller, these are the male children of the Vuvalini who were banished from their matriarchal society and sent to the outer limits of the Green Place, only for contamination and pollution to render the entire Green Place equally uninhabitable. Living their lives atop high stilts to avoid any with the poisonous earth, they’re shadowy figures who the audience sees little of and learns nothing about.

Why The Green Place’s Destruction Matters

Furiosa Screams in Mad Max

Although the Green Place is in effect a MacGuffin early on in Fury Road, giving the protagonists a goal to chase without actually being of vital plot importance itself, the area later takes on an important metaphorical meaning within the Mad Max universe. As a promised land inhabited by the matriarchal Vuvalini of Many Mothers, the Green Place is posited as the opposite of the terrifying amoral world of Immortan Joe's Citadel. However, the fact that the Vuvalini abandoned their male children to uphold their social model, only for the area to grow so toxic that it was eventually left to those mutated children, illustrates that the Vuvalini of Many Mothers can’t offer an alternative model for Mad Max’s world to work from.

Related: Mad Max: Why The Original Movie Is So Different To Fury Road

Although the denizens of the Citadel live in fear of a tyrannical leader and his brood of misogynistic War Boys, the destruction of the Green Place makes it clear that Furiosa and Immortan Joe’s captives can’t simply abandon this city and find a dream home elsewhere. Instead, they’re forced to face the evil and defeat it, rather than running to a too-good-to-be-true alternative that has its own fundamental flaws.

What This Means For Mad Max

tom hardy

The The Wasteland”) makes it clear that Miller isn’t finished with using the series to comment on ecological issues.

At a time when climate change is among the most prevalent fears in the moviegoing public worldwide, Fury Road’s depiction of the Green Place makes it clear that the Vuvalini of Many Mothers is no more able to maintain a stable society without destroying their environment than Immortan Joe and co. As such, having shown how hard it would be to successfully pull off, seeing the cast reclaiming the Green Place in a forthcoming Mad Max movie could be an opportunity for the director to further underline the series’ recurring arguments for ecological conservation.

More: Mad Max: What Happened to the Oceans (Did They Disappear)?